Exclusive: MySpace News Launches Thursday

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On Thursday morning MySpace will launch its much rumored news property at news.myspace.com. Expect the site to go live and a press release to be issued around 7 am EST.

The news property is built on Newroo technology, a company they acquired in early 2006 for a rumored $7 million. Newroo had interesting technology, but were acquired prior to launch.

I spoke to Newroo founders (and current Myspace/Fox employees) Brian Norgard and Dan Gould, as well as Fox Interactive Labs head Dan Strauss, this evening about the new property. Like Google news, MySpace news will pull news items from a number of trusted sources via their RSS feeds. The news items will then be organized into 25 main categories and 300 sub-categories including sports, politics, style, and technology. The order of the news items will be determined by user voting, taking into account the freshness of the news. Users can vote on each item of news with a ranking of 1-5. Higher ranked and higher voted items will appear at the top of each category.

Down the road we can probably expect users to be able to submit news items directly.

Screen shots below.

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Crunchbase

OverviewMySpace is one of the world's largest social networks, with about 125 million users. Originally inspired by [Friendster](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/friendster), MySpace quickly grew to become the world's largest social network, before being overtaken by [Facebook](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook). User pages are highly customizable and support integration with widgets such as [Slide](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/slide) …